A Reunabridged History of the Bigworld, Volume 81: Tanks
by mttspiii
Summary: This is a pan-polydeoxyriborevisionist perspective of the history of the entire Bigworld, written by some of the most esteemed ribonucleistic revisionist historians. This specific volume concerns the tanking and other similar aspects of history.
1. Introduction

Once there was a world. Bigworld it was called, and aptly so. And in it, life; life lived in it, or rather, on it.

In the beginning of Bigworld there were orcs and elves, who due to their differences in genetics and lifestyle hated each other like the xenophobic prats that they really were, and thus tended to fight a lot. However, orcs and elves tended to live a bit farther from each other, since any orc or elf population in close proximity to each other had a tendency to annihilate one or another, or both. And no matter what they claim as their casus belli, be it demonic possession or vengeance, deep down it was all xenophobia. And why not? Orcs are strong and tough green-skinned brutes who exhibit a strongly r-strategic population growth and a perchance for visceral combat whenever they feel like it, which is very often; elves are graceful and pretty peoples who in their perceived physical perfection meant that they are narcissistic - and quite competitive. Having preconceived notions of the mystical, and abducting lesser races for the required rituals for it, certainly didn't help either.

However, Bigworld is understandably big, and after some time the orcs and elves couldn't fight each other anymore since they don't even make contact in the first place, thus leaving them in seclusion in their own little habitats and ecosystems. This then led to troubles with another growing sentient race, the humans. Humans weren't green enough for the orcs, and weren't perfect enough for the elves. This meant that a large group of orcs would every now and then charge into human villages, smashing apart granaries and homes with sheer upper body strength directed at their stone-and-iron axes, while the elves would abduct a kid, or a family, or an entire town, just to test their particular brand of [often-failing] wood-magicks.

Despite these troubles, over time humanity has expanded and progressed, leaving the orcs and elves to stagnate to a relative lack of civilization but despite this, the two non-human races were still unmatched in battle, with the orcs' natural strength and toughness and the legendary elven grace in handling the bow and arrow being far more effective in warfare than their human counterparts. Indeed, the humans may have survived only because the orcs tended to kill each other if there was no enemy in sight, while the elves had to turn against each other to satiate their interest in magick.

Eventually, the humans have developed firearms, giving them for the first time a chance to reliably defend their cities against raids by elven archers or orcish axemen. The outlying areas however are still unsafe from the marauding orcs and elves because such a feat would require taking the fight to the orcs' and elves' own turf, which was simply impossible. Elves tend to lay and wait in ambush at night at their forest, in one case even sniping an entire human regiment dead in just five hours. On the other hand, orcs tend to live in some pretty inaccessible places; the logistics for lugging that many weapons and ammunition to bring the fight to their communities was too difficult.

Indeed, it was only within the past century or two, with the advent of various technologies such as combustion engines, modern steel industries, and systematic military tactics that the various human nations have become finally confident enough to seriously plan an eradication of these long-time nemeses. The human commonfolk, however, had feared the orcs and elves so deeply down in their psyches that any such proposal would be fiercely resisted by the citizens, nor would any soldiers show up for the expeditions, no. It would take a national tragedy to rivet the people of a country to finally rid themselves of this bane, and face their massive fear of it.


	2. The Beginning of Modern Tankery

When Rasputin's corpse sailed down the river that night, filled with numerous wounds, few would have thought of its effect of the Russian peoples. He was a man well-loved by Mother Russia herself, as well as all the women in it, who wanted to just get to know more about him and his endowment - personally. This man, after all, has a sort of an open-secret affair with the queen despite his commoner background. He has invited throes of other women, of a wide spectrum of personalities, in his own chamber in the palace. And this man is, at the very least, trying to cure the prince of haemophilia which would not be understood as a genetic disease and thus would only occur precisely because royalty only makes children with other royalty - Rasputin is a way out of this vicious cycle of sick royalty begetting bad monarchs who are worse in bed.

But he was hacked. A slow, agonizing death made of numerous strenuous exertions while being hacked; such is his strength, and virility, that he struggled with numerous axes all over his body.

It was a tense moment, and a bad time for Rasputin to die. He was but one of the few ways the nobility under the king, and the peasant under Lenin, got in jive with. And why not, the ladies of the aristocracy loved him, and the wenches of the proletariat adored him the same way that women of all classes today go mad about rock stars and TV actors. And when this 'great equalizer' Rasputin being rather gone, someone is to blame. And based on the hack-marks, it must be orcs. It's always the orcs. But somebody has to be blamed for the orcs of course.

The proletariat blamed the king for not giving its citizens adequate protection. Weekly orc raids were making the already-difficult wheat quotas even harder to accomplish, but Rasputin's death at the hands a freak orc incursion is too much. The aristocracy blamed the proletariat as well for the death of their idol; the commoners' hamlets were not attractive enough for the orcs to attack first, so the green-skins were forced to attack the cities of the ruling elite, and only Rasputin with his sheer manliness was able to keep the royal family and the rest of the nobility safe, at a great sacrifice to his life. Which, of course, is his own life.

Thus, like in any modern concert without a decent security detail, the rabid fangirls of the upper and lower classes began catfighting. And despite the implications, their boyfriends, husbands, and other loved ones came to defend their women. It was all that was needed to ignite the centuries-old tension between the two groups, and from it a revolution was born.

And, as far as the heavens go, revolutions always, **always**, lead us back to where we started. The same way happened to the Russian revolution, as the nobility was swept away by a red tide of utterly pissed-off peasantry, the victors began squabbling among themselves, mostly over who is the biggest Rasputin fan. And when the traditional Rasputin's healing charms count-off contest, where the true Rasputin fan is the girl who has collected the most and the rarest of Rasputin's healing charms, couldn't give a clear decision of who wins, it begat a civil war in the midst of civil war. Even the orcs themselves found difficulty in raiding due to the subsequent chain of civil wars Rasputin's death caused, because while normally the cowardly humans would run away after a loud roar, this time the women would pounce on the orcs themselves and poke an eye or chew off heads. They are still as vulnerable to orcish axes as ordinary humans of course, but driving an axe on a rabid fangirl on top of Buddy Orky's head meant a dead human, on top of a freshly-cleaved orc skull. And team-killing, even for orcs, meant that the team-killer is fair game for clobbering.

Finally some human sense returned to the Russians, as the infighting decreased. This infighting though decreased not exactly of peaceful reasons – there was bad blood between everyone back then – but because of the human nature of teaming up against an enemy in temporary alliances. And that enemy, of course, was the orcs, the primary reason the revolution really began.

This time though, under the leadership of Comrade Lenin, with the power of a new Russia and a much-improved industry in his hands, he shall wipe out the orcs under the sway of this new revolution, unlike his predecessors who just let the orcs run rampant. And to do so, he got his friends to set up the precious 'fruit' of the industry for that very task.


	3. MS-1: The Put-Put-Put That Could

The People's Army has finally gotten itself some prototypes from a bunch of odd people from the West, detailing the deployment of agricultural tractors with gunpowder devices, and steel armor like the knights of the older times who defended young Russia from the orcish threats.

Of course, the knights of that era did not have to put up with snow this deep; it surely would have made the very difficult task of walking in armor even worse. The orcs never had this problem since they could just tumble down the cliffs or slog through snow, and still make it into battle in one piece. But now, industry has created a juggernaut.

Or rather, capitalist artisans have made the juggernaut. But Lenin's great commune will use it. Properly.

Hundreds of soldiers were deployed together with the juggernauts, across the desolate Russian snow towards one of the largest orc settlements in the area. They call this place the "Arctic Circle", the 'Arctic' denoting its rather obvious coldness, while 'Circle' represents the route that humans have taken in it during the fierce dark winters; of course appending "Wandering" before "Circle" would have been more precise, but that addition would have made the name of the location rather too long. And now, with the advances in geography and cartography, "Wandering Circle" has been rendered obsolete as well; as long as the freshly-recruited soldiers can see the Signal Flags for up to 45 meters away, they are not lost.

Under the command of Comrade Zaslavsky, the designer of the juggernaut MS-1, his battlegroup of fifteen of these machines was tasked to wipe out all of the orcs. Armed with firearm designs directly lifted from source, the 37 mm. Hotchkiss cannons were loaded with 96 shells per vehicle stowed all over the hull and turret, which was made of 16-18 mm of steel. This, Zaslavsky hoped, would be enough to kill an orc in one shot, while being able to withstand Orcish axes. The whole gun-and-armor setup was propelled by an MS-1 engine, which was rated to be as good as 43 horses, except that of course 43 horses would take up a lot of space, need a lot of food, and are too moody. All these 43 horse-powers would be transmitted by a transmission system to a tracked sprung suspension which was tested to be good enough to get them past the snow, though oftentimes the very hot engine is already enough to melt any snow too thick to get past for the suspension.

Despite Communism being widely seen as focused on equality, it would not be the case for the Zaslavsky battlegroup. Indeed, the mantra for Communism is not really total equality per se, but "to each according to his need". Thus, Comrade Zaslavsky has had his MS-1 outfitted with a few extras not available to his brothers-in-arms, like _actual_ Brothers-in-arms such as his own brother, driving the tank. The Zaslavsky brothers also had the lion's share of the rations supply, had imported oil from the West by Lend-Lease talks with various sympathizers of Communism there, and a proper cooling system of vents and fans because the engines are really that hot. Additionally, in the months leading to the assault on Arctic Circle the Zaslavsky brothers have worked feverishly on improving their tank, designing a new turret that made their tank tougher in the process, as well as giving Commander Zaslavsky a better view of the battlefield. They have also improved on the suspension because the new turret is heavier (and so are the Zaslavsky brothers, due to the Extra Combat Rations), which by shifting all their weight to a side or so, they could even make the tank turn around faster. To push all of this extra weight they developed a new engine from a lorry, the GAZ-M1, which was both lighter and more powerful than the basic MS-1 engine. While the GAZ-M1 is a good engine already at 55 horse-powers, they further pushed engine construction to the limit to create the AMO-3, which was even more powerful at 70 horse-powers. This was compensated however by a significantly greater weight, which in the end did not give much of a difference compared to its predecessor. Nonetheless the Zaslavskys chose the AMO-3 engine for their personal tank, just in case they had to pull all of the other tanks back home. Finally, their tank was fitted with even more powerful cannon, 45 mm cannon which they were able to pull out from a defensive turret at the nearest city. Indeed, they pulled out the _rest_ of the defensive turret as well, and used it as the base for their improved turret in the first place.

But all these improvements were for the Zaslavsky MS-1 particularly because they need it; they are going to coordinate the attack (thus the installation of a 71-TK-1 radio in place of Signal Flags), and be at the vanguard of the formation against the Orcish army itself, under the rule of Vlad, also known as the Impaler, due to his use of a very long spear in battle which he was often noted to carry into battle with a few humans still skewered into it. Oftentimes in battle, he would thrust so many humans through with his spear that in mid-battle he would call upon his 'squire' to remove the excess humans which were clogging up the pointy end of his weapon; it has always been a mystery for Orcosocial analysts whether the leftover humans in his spear were there as war trophies, or to demoralize human enemies, or because Vlad was merely too lazy to clean his spear, and up to now is still a topic of hot debate.

What, however, is known about Vlad is that he always leads his army in the front lines the same way the Zaslavskys did to their puny battlegroup, and when the two forces finally met, it was a head-to head battle with Vlad running towards the Zaslavsky MS-1 and thrusting his spear at the coaxial gun, jamming it and breaking Vlad's beloved spear apart. In a bloodcurdling howl of sheer annoyance, Vlad then grabbed his axe sidearm and with much force slammed it hard against the hull of the MS-1.

"It bounced off."

With a loud "THUNK!" that resounded throughout Arctic Circle, the axe rebounded straight back into Vlad's skull, cleaving it. All the rest of the orcs watched as the "thunk" killed their ruler, and with their language being largely onomatopoeic, they then retreated en masse, repeatedly chanting "...thunk thunk thunk..." as they were cut down by 37mm and 45mm armor-piercing shells going through the thick orc hide – and out to the next thick orc hide, eventually leaving five orcs per shell with holes on their body the size of their axes. Trundling slowly the MS-1 kept shooting until all the orcs in the field were either cut open or run over by 4.7 tonnes of engine-heated metal scorching through their skin and breaking their bones. The orcish caves were then shot at with Zaslavsky's high-explosive shells until the crude wooden scaffolds keeping it up collapsed, trapping thousands more of orcs under the ground to starve in darkness.

With a snooty, sooty put-put-put, the brave little MS-1s have finally defeated the plague of Orcs with minimal damage, and headed back home to be lavished with medals for their bravery and heroism in combat. Or if not bravery and herosim, then at least for their effectiveness and skill in it.


End file.
